OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING IN SCIENTIFIC COMPUTATIONS: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA

Undoubtedly, Fortran dominates the field of scientific computing from commercial packages to university programs. Although Pascal and C have managed to seduce some programmers with their newer design, the majority of users still favours Fortran into which most of those new features are eventually incorporated. The innovative programming tools offered by new languages have not been able to justify the time and cost required for the training of programmers and the porting of existent code.